These Game-Changing Devices Boost Your Health—Overnight!

I'm not much for adornment. I don't wear jewelry. I don't wear a watch. Heck, I haven't worn my wedding ring the past couple years, despite being happily married. (Really.)

So it was with more than a little trepidation I pulled the Jawbone UP24 on my left wrist about 4 months ago, with the intention to wear it as much as possible for the next 100 days.

The UP24 is Jawbone's most recent entry in the ever-crowding space known as activity trackers—bands, buttons, and sticks that you wear to keep an eye on what you're up to. The scope of what they track (from movement to biometrics including heart rate) largely depends on the sensors embedded in each one. The UP24 is pretty par-for-the-course: the accelerometers track movement. It is, at its essence, a very smart pedometer.

And it's part of the even-larger, cooler stable of products known as wearables, digital technology attached to your person. With Apple and Google reportedly poised to launch smartwatches of some sort this year, wearables are about to go the route of tablets, from "say-what" anonymity to ubiqity by Christmas.

I did appreciate the UP24 as an agent of accountability and truth-telling, especially in this worst of all winters, when getting outside was difficult-to-impossible, and tracking how little I moved some days was a good spur to movement in the evening. And I paired it with Runkeeper, so when I did manage to get outside and run, I was able to synch up my steps with the distance covered. The two apps seemed to pretty much agree on the distance covered. So no problem there.

But while tracking movement is helpful, it's not particularly surprising. I know how much I walk. And the band requires my input to figure out what to make of my less step-centric workouts (say, a kettlebell or TRX session). It did not offer me any insight into my blood pressure or heart rate. Those sensors are not part of the UP24's arsenal (there's always the Jawbone UP25).

All that said, I did find my Jawbone fascinating. It just surprised me that it did its most enlightening work when I was asleep.

Yup, asleep. If you wear the UP24 overnight, it will measure your movement overnight and extrapolate your periods of light and deep sleep. And that was eye-opening.

I assumed that my sleep was generally the same, night after night. I was very wrong. (See above: to decode, the dark blue is deep slep, the light blue is light sleep and the yellow is when I came out of sleep.)

In fact, the quality and cadence of my sleep varied quite a bit. When I was very tired heading to bed, I could sleep virtually without movement for two and sometimes three or more hours at a time. Then there were the choppy nights.

Certainly, there were nights when work or family issues, even the anxiety of an extremely early wakeup time the following morning, would have me ducking in and out of sleep all night. But there were other nights when nothing was bothering me, but I still woke up between 2 and 3 a.m., and I often didn’t return to deep sleep again until 5 a.m.

When I looked closely, I realized that these were nights when I drank alcohol. The most surprising fact was that it took relatively little alcohol—just one beer or one glass of wine—to see the effect. It got worse with a second beer (and it was bad in the early hours of New Year’s Day, see above), but that initial 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. wakeup call was consistent with any evening alcohol at all.

As my experiment progressed, I realized that I felt more refreshed on the mornings after I completely skipped on alcohol. It wasn't day and night, but it was noticeable once brought to my attention.

The folks at Jawbone are seeing similar data—and having similar experiences. Jason Donahue, a product manager for the Up band (and no relation), had his own sleep epiphany.

"When I go to bed later, I tend to take fewer steps the next day," Jason said. "I typically go to bed during the 12 p.m. hour. When I go to bed later, I tend to take fewer steps the next day. I typically go to bed during the 12 p.m. hour and average 11,658 steps. When I go to bed during the 1 a.m. hour, I average 9,367 steps the next day. That's 20 percent fewer steps when I go to bed later."

So now, when I'm feeling a bit run-down, first thing I'll do is not have a post-dinner glass of wine to unwind. Instead, I brew up some green tea. The next morning, I don't have to check the UP24's companion iPhone app to know that I slept more soundly. I can feel it.

That was a valuable lesson. But after 100 days, I'm thinking I can take off the band. While it's comfortable, it is a band on your wrist, and it can get in the way, especially at night. I think I learned what I'm going to learn for now. I'll likely pull it back on in a couple months to see what’s different when the weather warms up.

The UP24 was, in an oblique way, a marital aid. After wearing a rubber activity band around my wrist for three months, I had to admit that having a small circle of gold on my left ring finger wasn't the inconvenience I'd made it out to be. So the ring's back, the UP24 is sitting on my night stand, and my wife is enthusiastic about the swap. And while the UP24 doesn't track that, I do.

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